The Port of Missing Men eBook

Armitage pointed down the road with his riding-crop.
As Chauvenet walked slowly away, swinging his stick,
Armitage turned toward the hotel. The shadow
of night was enfolding the hills, and it was quite
dark when he found Oscar and the horses.

He mounted, and they rode through the deepening April
dusk, up the winding trail that led out of Storm Valley.

CHAPTER XV

SHIRLEY LEARNS A SECRET

Nightingales warble about it
All night under blossom and star;
The wild swan is dying without it,
And the eagle crieth afar;
The sun, he doth mount but to find it
Searching the green earth o’er;
But more doth a man’s heart mind it—­
O more, more, more!

—­G.E. Woodberry.

Shirley Claiborne was dressed for a ride, and while
waiting for her horse she re-read her brother’s
letter; and the postscript, which follows, she read
twice:

“I shall never live down my acquaintance with
the delectable Armitage. My brother officers
insist on rubbing it in. I even hear, ma cherie,
that you have gone into retreat by reason of the exposure.
I’ll admit, for your consolation, that he really
took me in; and, further, I really wonder who the
devil he is,—­or was! Our last
interview at the Club, after Chauvenet told his story,
lingers with me disagreeably. I was naturally
pretty hot to find him playing the darkly mysterious,
which never did go with me,—­after eating
my bird and drinking my bottle. As a precaution
I have looked up Chauvenet to the best of my ability.
At the Austro-Hungarian Embassy they speak well of
him. He’s over here to collect the price
of a few cruisers or some such rubbish from one of
our sister republics below the Gulf. But bad
luck to all foreigners! Me for America every
time!”

* * * *
*

“Dear old Dick!” and she dropped the letter
into a drawer and went out into the sunshine, mounted
her horse and turned toward the hills.

She had spent the intermediate seasons of the year
at Storm Springs ever since she could remember, and
had climbed the surrounding hills and dipped into
the valleys with a boy’s zest and freedom.
The Virginia mountains were linked in her mind to
the dreams of her youth, to her earliest hopes and
aspirations, and to the books she had read, and she
galloped happily out of the valley to the tune of an
old ballad. She rode as a woman should, astride
her horse and not madly clinging to it in the preposterous
ancient fashion. She had known horses from early
years, in which she had tumbled from her pony’s
back in the stable-yard, and she knew how to train
a horse to a gait and how to master a beast’s
fear; and even some of the tricks of the troopers
in the Fort Myer drill she had surreptitiously practised
in the meadow back of the Claiborne stable.

It was on Tuesday that John Armitage had appeared
before her in the pergola. It was now Thursday
afternoon, and Chauvenet had been to see her twice
since, and she had met him the night before at a dance
at one of the cottages.